Politics

03/30/2015

A third of Republicans believe the president poses an imminent threat to the United States, outranking concerns about Russian President Putin and Syrian President Assad in a Reuters/Ipsos poll.

Given the level of polarization in U.S. politics, the results aren't that surprising, says Barry Glassner, a sociologist and author of "The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things."

"There tends to be a lot of demonizing of the person who is in the office," Glassner says.

02/03/2015

David Slawson, a lawyer on the Warren Commission who searched for evidence of a foreign conspiracy in the assassination, now believes there was a “massive cover-up” by government officials who wanted to hide the fact that — if they'd acted on evidence they had in November 1963 — the assassination might have been prevented.

So says former New York Times reporter Philip Shenon, in the afterword to the new paperback edition of his book "A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination."

Slawson says that while he's certain Lee Harvey Oswald was the only gunman, he suspects that the CIA withheld from the commission its knowledge of meetings Oswald had in Mexico with Cuban diplomats and Mexican civilians who urged Oswald to kill Kennedy.

Slawson theorizes that Attorney General Robert Kennedy and the CIA worked together to hide information about Oswald’s Mexico trip from the commission because they feared that the investigation might stumble onto the fact that JFK’s administration had been trying for years, sometimes with the help of the Mafia, to assassinate Castro.

Mexico had been a staging area for the plots against Castro, says Shenon.

And public disclosure of the plots, says Slawson, could have derailed, if not destroyed, Robert Kennedy’s political career; he had led his brother’s secret war against Castro.

01/21/2015

In his next-to-the-last State of the Union address on Tuesday night, the president rejected any notion that he should be cowed by the midterm election results that gave Republicans a resounding victory, says an Associated Press analysis.

"At times boastful, confident and even cocky, Obama appeared unfazed by his party’s electoral pounding in the midterm election less than three months ago or his year of slouching approval ratings," says the Los Angeles Times.

Watching the emboldened Obama, it would have been easy to forget that it was just two months after the biggest electoral repudiation of his presidency, says a New York Times analysis.

"Rarely has the disconnect between a president and Congress seemed as wide as it is now," the Times says.

Obama’s advisers say he sees little reason to hold back on his ambitions just because the new Republican majorities are unlikely to go along.

But Republicans say Obama risks looking ineffectual and out of touch if he promotes initiatives that Congress never will take seriously.

"How the speech will play depends almost entirely on how you viewed Obama going into it," says The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza.

"For his allies and even many liberals who had grown sour on him, it was a triumphant speech in which both his own soaring confidence and his dismissal of his political rivals was fitting and appropriate," Cillizza says. "For his detractors, the speech was everything they loathe about him: cocky, combative and forever campaigning."

01/16/2015

GOP leaders plan to unveil on Friday new rules for presidential debates that are expected to cut the number of debates roughly in half from the two dozen or so that were held in the last nomination cycle.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus says he considers the 2012 debates “an embarrassment and ridiculous” for the party.

“It was like a dog-and-pony show,” he says. “I think debates are important, but just because you’re a good debater doesn’t mean you’re going to be a good president. It’s just too much of an importance on debating.”

01/09/2015

When it comes to choosing a party’s candidate in the voting booth, one pattern in modern American politics is so familiar it's become a truism: The rich vote Republican, and the poor vote Democratic, the Pew Research Center says.

But a new analysis of the center's survey data collected in the runup to the 2014 midterm elections finds that "at least as striking" is the degree to which people who are financially insecure opt out of the political system altogether, Pew says.

So the Democratic Party left far more potential votes on the table than did the Republicans in the midterms, Pew says.

Younger politicians — some in office, others pursuing it — who might have become national leaders were defeated in the 2010 and 2014 elections, leaving Democrats' best-known leaders "almost entirely from an older generation," says The Washington Post's Dan Balz.

Particularly bad for Democrats have been their losses in the states — "the breeding ground for future national talent and for policy experimentation," says Balz.

08/19/2014

The president "appears remarkably distant from his own party on Capitol Hill, with his long neglect of would-be allies catching up to him," says The New York Times.

"What is striking now is the way prominent Democrats’ views of Mr. Obama’s shortcomings are spilling out into public, and how resigned many seem that the relationship will never improve," says the Times.

I'm not sure that this is, or should be, surprising. A president is, after all, just a person with the usual array of strengths and weaknesses.

The Times does note that some Democrats "have just learned to accept the president’s solitary nature and move on."

Rep. Steny Hoyer, Md., the No. 2 House Democrat, who has been in Congress since 1981, says that compared with Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, Obama “is more self-contained, less gregarious.”

“Does it somewhat take away from his spending more time with members of Congress and the Senate and politics? Yes.” But, Hoyer says, “this president has reached out as much as any president in my view, been open to compromise as much as any I’ve observed.”

Since the president announced in June that he would bypass congressional gridlock and overhaul the country's immigration system on his own, lobbyists and interest groups have been making their case at the White House out of public view, says The New York Times.

"The go-it-alone approach has left the administration — which claims to be the most transparent in United States history — essentially making policy from the White House, replacing congressional hearings and floor debates with closed meetings for invited constituencies," says the Times.

“Those who are ‘in’ will engage the White House and the agencies to get their priorities met, and if you’re ‘out,’ you turn to the legal process” to challenge the executive action after it is taken, says Andrew Rudalevige, a government professor at Bowdoin College who has studied the consequences of executive action.

White House officials say Obama has been reaching out to an array of lawmakers, experts and business leaders for a wide range of perspectives to inform his plans for executive actions.

08/07/2014

Interviews the ex-president sat through nine years later with a former aide are being rereleased this week for a new generation by the Richard Nixon Presidential Library & Museum and the Richard Nixon Foundation.

The tapes are being billed by the library as revealing the former president's more emotional, candid and reflective side.

Even in 1983, nearly a decade later, Nixon appears to see himself as a man wronged, saying he resisted resigning because it would be an "admission of guilt" that would set a bad example for future presidents, the Times says.

Watergate historian Stanley Kutler describes the videos as a desperate attempt to "rewrite history" and says he urged the library to create a more informative exhibit. "This was Nixon carefully programmed. ... This was Nixon in the middle of his last campaign."

Clips are appearing each day through Saturday on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

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